A process whereby one group of people moves to forcibly control another, dispossessing them of their lands and moving to impose the colonising culture on them. Educator Paulo Freire called this latter project “cultural invasion” and argued that schooling is a particularly potent means of achieving and maintaining the colonisation objective. While combative colonisation is often thought of as a historical relic of times gone by, colonisation by more surreptitious means is very much a feature of contemporary life (see Hegemony). Colonisation is achieved by physical, social, emotional and spiritual means, with genocide, forced removal of people, prohibitions on existing cultural practice (including and especially language), re-naming of people and places, and the derogation of existing ways of knowing all aimed at the erasure of communal memory of pre-colonial times and ways. Colonisation also draws up resistance and oppositional projects of cultural renewal, resilience and retrieval by colonised peoples.
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